Look Who’s Testifying

Posted: March 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic Policy, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 43 Comments

Basically this is "who" is testifying.

The armageddon on women’s civil rights never stops. How else to prevent the middle and working class from coming together and demanding people be put before profit than to keep conflating corporations and fetuses with the lives of living, breathing human beings. From RH Reality Check’s Martha Kempner:

A fetus is scheduled to testify in front of the Ohio legislature. I kid you not. Though I suppose I should rephrase that to say that an “unborn human individual” is scheduled to testify as that is the term that the bill, originally introduced by Representative Lynn Wachtman, prefers.  The legislation, nicknamed the “Heartbeat Bill,” is being piloted in Ohio by a group called Faith 2 Action and seeks to make illegal all abortions that take place after a fetal heartbeat can be detected.  It defines “unborn human individual” as “an individual organism of the species homo sapiens from fertilization until live birth.”  And one of these organisms is apparently going to address the Ohio House of Representatives.

How exactly its handlers are going to arrange this is not quite clear, though it appears that a woman who is nine weeks pregnant is going to have an ultrasound on the spot. ( It seems worth noting that at nine weeks fetuses tend to be too small to be detected by the classic over-the-belly ultrasounds of TV and movies, so in order for the audience to see this “witness,” it will be necessary to use an intra-vaginal probe.) It seems obvious to me that the witness, described by Faith 2 Action as “the youngest witness to ever come before the House Health Committee,” will not actually be speaking. While the pregnant woman may have something to say, my guess is that the bill’s supporters are hoping that a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Of course, it gets worse… Stupakistan is the nightmare that never ends after all:

Clearly, the promoters of this bill hope that the vaguely human images on the screen will convince lawmakers that this organism in its earliest stages of development is, in fact, a person.  Faith 2 Action makes this clear in its new music video supporting the bill.  Set to the tune of “99 Red Balloons,” the video intersperses in-utero images of fetuses with those of adorable dancing babies and includes lyrics such as “some time ago, we don’t know why, a court ruled to make babies cry.  Now we can stop their decree and protect children like me.”   It continues:  “when they hear our hearts they’ll care, send a message someone’s in there.”

Here’s the youtube:

It’s like the activism gene went awry in a segment of the population, and they seriously think this is the biggest issue going on today. Genocide? Nope. Unemployment? Nope. Lack of healthcare? Nope. Maternal health? Nope. Education of Girls? Nope. Anything that actually affects the living? A big fat nuh uh. Anything that would actually result in less pregnancies to begin with? Negative (rather Speaker Boehner wants to win the war against this…) But, the life of the unborn… my goodness yes, let’s protect the right of more unborn “people” to become miserable un-people like the rest of us.

Care2.com has more here.

The Selective Mutism of the Progressive Village

Posted: February 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Egypt, income inequality, POTUS | Tags: , , , , | 32 Comments

This is going to be long, but it won’t work well to separate it into two posts. So I’ve divided it up into sections that you can read if it’s too much to digest in one sitting.

Part I: Obama’s Truly-Significant-Best-Month-Ever is O-V-E-R

Exhibit A

Huffington Post/Chris Weignant, February 2nd:

In January, President Obama’s approval rating went significantly higher, while his disapproval rating continued a trend of dropping with a big spike downward. What both of these meant, taken together, is that Obama is once again “above water” in the polls, with his approval rating beating his disapproval rating. This hasn’t happened since last June. But, in reality, Obama has pretty much erased his past entire year’s slow slide in poll numbers — in a single month. Obviously, he didn’t hit an all-time high in absolute numbers, but still, when taken month-to-month, January, 2011, was Obama’s best month of his entire presidency. Not only did he finally get his bump — but it was a truly significant bump.

Exhibit B

Gallup Daily, February 2nd-4th:

Gallup Daily, February 3rd-5th:

I’m not going to waste time putting the Rasmussen tracking chart up, but it shows the same drop. Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog has this to say about it:

This Rasmussen poll has gotten a bit of attention, and not exclusively from the right

Okay, let me interject there for a moment, because I think Obama’s poll numbers dropping off has gotten attention “exclusively from the right”–or at least in terms of what people will cop to paying attention to openly. Since I haven’t seen much discussion in the progressive Village making itself readily available, I’ve been combing through blogs and news outlets trying to find any commentary on the complete reversal of the hyperbolic narrative that was floating just a few days ago–that Obama was King of the Polls again–but almost all of the discussion I’m seeing of Obama’s approvals tanking is coming from the usual wingnut suspects. If you click on Steve M’s “a bit of attention” link, you’ll see an archive of the memeorandum listings under the item on the Rasmussen polling numbers: James Joyner, Gateway Pundit, Hot Air, Scared Monkeys… (the Jennifer Rubin link there doesn’t even discuss the Rasmussen poll.) I don’t see any lefty or even moderate names there, do you?

Anyhow, Steve M continues:

Yeah, yeah, it’s Rasmussen — though, as James Joyner notes, the numbers have worsed in the new Rasmussen poll compared to old Rasmussen polls. Presumably the right-wing bias hasn’t worsened, right? (Call me naive, but I don’t think Rasmussen just makes these numbers up — I think the polls have a right-wing sample bias, and the bias is baked into the data, but that there’s real polling going on nonetheless.)

The reason I take this somewhat seriously is that similar things seem to be happening in Gallup’s daily Obama approval tracking poll — run your cursor over the graph and you see that the president’s approval number was solidly ahead of his disapproval number for much of late January, peaking at 50%-41% in the January 27-29 period. Now it’s down to 45%-47%.

Or, rather, it’s back down to 45%-47%. That’s roughly where Obama was in the Gallup poll pretty consistently from June through early January.

His rationale is that “Obama approval has just returned to baseline”:

So I don’t think Obama’s being hurt by his response to the situation in Egypt (a meme the right would desperately like to spread) so much as he’s not being helped anymore by the three things that met with public favor in the past month and a half or so — the productive lame duck session, the State of the Union address, and (especially) the very well-received Tucson speech.

Wait just a frick-on-a-stickin’ minute there…

Did Steve M just include the president’s SOTU address as one of the three things that met with public favor and had helped his ratings? I’m not so sure about that. In fact, I think it was such a lackluster and forgettable speech that the after-effects of what was left out of the speech damaged his credibility. As Charles Blow noted in response to Obama’s annual address:

President Obama made history on Tuesday.

It was only the second time since Harry S. Truman’s State of the Union address in 1948 that such a speech by a Democratic president did not include a single mention of poverty or the plight of the poor.

And, that’s not all Obama left out. While revolution was erupting in Egypt, with its middle and working class citizens joining together and rising up to demand their human rights and–among other things–an end to persistent unemployment, the president of the United States uttered the words “Egypt” and “Egyptians” not once.

I don’t think in light of what has happened over the last week that Obama’s speech served him well at all. Sure, various instant analysis polls afterward were inflated with happy campers, but that’s out of the people who thought it was important enough to watch the speech in the first place. If you go by the Nielsen numbers, there’s a drop off there too… for goodness sake, even Perez Hilton kept track:

Less people were interested in what President Obama had to say this year.

About 43 million people watched his State of the Union address Tuesday night, which was down in viewership from the previous year. In fact, about 11% less people watched the speech.

There was also No SOTU Bump for Obama this year.

I think once Americans had a chance to sit back, forget the words that were in the speech, and observe the events that transpired in their wake, the words that were missing from the president’s address (poor, poverty, Egypt, Egyptians…) have come into stark and stunning relief. Obama is not a “different” kind of politician or president–he is an indifferent one.

If you’re reading this on the frontpage and are interested, there’s a Part II, III, and IV after the fold.

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